This was theirs and theirs alone-front room, kitchen, bedroom, screened washing porch with wooden steps leading to a scraggly back yard with an outhouse. Every room was tiny, the whole house was the size of one good-sized room, but it was a miracle to them, having both grown up with a horde of siblings, sharing beds, sharing clothes, sharing everything. Odile and Jean-Francois rented a shotgun house on a bend of River Road between the railroad tracks and the graveyard. There was so much more liquor in south Louisiana after Prohibition, the price of a drink went down. Many a fortune was made running rum and bootleg whiskey through the web of bayous and backwaters filtering to the Gulf of Mexico. Who was going to enforce the Noble Cause? No one. New Orleans was dubbed the “liquor capital of America,” but the small towns along the coast were even more soaked in alcohol. It was Prohibition times, but that meant almost nothing in south Louisiana. Work didn’t bother Jean-Francois, it was expected, he did it without complaint it was the evenings he looked forward to. He could cook, quiet a baby, work a cane field or build anything you wanted, whistling all the while. Jean-Francois was the oldest of a brood of half brothers and sisters he helped raise. His mother died in childbirth when he was two years old, and his father remarried soon after. The heavy work didn’t bother Jean-Francois, who had been working hard for as long as he could remember. Jean-Francois worked at the shell crusher, hauling fifty-pound bags of pulverized oyster shells used for covering roads and parking lots, a modern improvement over dirt paths, which turned to muddy ruts in the Louisiana rain. She worked faster than most to make enough to enroll in an English grammar class once a week at the Marcel School for adults, intent on getting her high school diploma. Odile took a job at a seafood warehouse on Front Street down by the river, picking crabs for ten cents a pound, leaving her fingers bloody from the sharp shells and swollen from the wetness.

They spoke nuanced French with each other, broken English to the outside world. Jean Francois had just turned twenty-six. He always had a harmonica in his pocket and was a world-class whistler. Jean-Francois was five-foot-eleven, broad-shouldered, good-looking, and genial. Odile was dark-haired, wide-faced, pretty in her way, with lively eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Martinville before eloping on the steamboat Amy Hewes (with a dancehall onboard), planning a church wedding once they’d settled and started making money. They’d been married in the parish clerk’s office in St. She carried a carefully folded spelling certificate congratulating her on a perfect score, in case it might help her get a job. He had a third-grade education, she’d made it through seventh.

ODILE AUCOIN and Jean-Francois LeBlanc took a steamboat down Bayou Teche in 1923 to the river town of Cours D’eau, Louisiana, to make their fortune together, exchanging a hardscrabble rural life for opportunities only a boomtown could offer.

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